Does your government agency monitor the social media for information relevant to your mission? Should it?

IBM's Analytics Solution Center recently held a seminar to explore
how agencies and companies can obtain value and insight using social
media analysis.

Pat Fiorenza discussed how agencies can develop an ROI Model - Return
on Influence Model - for social media. Agencies use social media
analytics to help inform their decision making by gathering
information/research, and learn what other agencies and citizens are
saying. Interesting examples from CDC and Govloop were provided.
Learn more here.

Ed Burek, IBM, talked about how savvy companies are now taping into
customer generated content, how government agencies could do the same to
learn how tax payers feel about government actions and messaging. He
gave examples of how regulatory agencies could received the unvarnished
comments from those impacted by regulations, as well as how they could
stay on top of "negative chatter." IBM has created a framework to
derive business insight from the vast amounts of social media that is
now being transmitted. Called Cognos Consumer Insight it provides real
time information on trends and sentiment.

Rick Lawrence, IBM Manager for Machine Learning at Watson Research
Center next talked about the leading edge of social media analytics. He
provided examples from the research portfolio on discovering Who are
the Key Influencers? , Identifying emerging topics of discussion, and
Mapping the billions of tweet to concepts that we really care about.

All of the presentations are available on the ASC website under Past Events (May 10, 2012)

Does your agency care about what its constituents are saying about it
on social media? Does your agency need to have real time intelligence
on events within its mission space? With 340 million Tweets per Day, 2
million blog posts, and 500 million facebook updates, how can you find
the important information? Social Media Analytics may be an idea
whose time has come.

At the end of the Superbowl, people created 12,233 tweets per second.And it turns out that was less than half the
number of tweets created in Japan
on December 9th, when 25,088 tweets per second were recorded about
the Castle in the Sky anime movie.Which, according to the Chinese, is nothing compared to the 32,312
messages per second sent on their twitter-like Sina Weibo system during the
beginning of the Chinese new year.

Within the government space, we’re no strangers to our own Big Data.Whether you’re in the DOD or NASA, the IRS or
SSA, you’ve got your own Big Data to deal with.

Last week, Forrester Research released a report that should help those in
government understand the Big Data Market.It is called “ The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012,
(February 2, 2012)” report[1]. IBM Technologies evaluated were IBM InfoSphere
BigInsights (IBM’s Hadoop-based offering), and IBM Netezza Analytics. In this
evaluation, IBM was placed in the Leaders category of the Wave and achieved the
highest possible score in both the Strategy and Market Presence segments. In
the third segment, Current Offering, IBM received the second highest score. You
can download
the complete report here.

The report by analyst James
Kobielus states, “IBM has the deepest Hadoop platform and application portfolio.”

The IBM Analytics Solution
Center in Washington, DC
also focused on how to handle Big Data at its January 19th
seminar.The seminar covered various
aspects of Big Data including data-in-motion processing software, Hadoop
software, SONAS (scale out network attached storage), and the Netezza data
warehouse appliance.

1.Big Data in Motion

Going
back to the Tweeting, if you’re a government agency and you need to get
actionable insights into 10s of thousands of tweets per second which might be
about an unfolding crisis, how would you do it?InfoSphere Streams is unlike anything else in the market in its ability
to ingest, analyze and act on data “in motion” – that is, data is processed and
analyzed at microsecond latencies.

2.Hadoop Big Data

Hadoop
is an open source codebase supported by the Apache software foundation.It is designed to process large volumes of
unstructured data. For example, if a government agency wanted to analyze months
of tweets or documents in non-real time, the Hadoop distributed file system
would be a good choice.The enterprise
class IBM Hadoop-based offering, BigInsights, is designed with system
management, security, and performance features that go beyond what is available
in the open source.It provides the
ability to analyze and extract information from a wide variety of data sources,
and promotes data exploration and discovery.

3.SONAS

Network
Attached Storage, or NAS, has become a very popular way to provide storage
within an organization.However NAS has
a number of limitations when dealing withBig Data including the number of objects (files) it can support, support
for very large files, the i/o bandwidth
it can deliver to applications, and fragmented data management across multiple
systems.The IBM SONAS system is
designed to overcome these limitations and look like a very large virtual
system to the applications.

4.Data Warehouse Appliance

Traditional
data warehouses when used for large volumes of structured data can be costly to
operate and maintain, and can be very slow when used for sophisticated
analysis.The Netezza appliance is a
dedicated device requiring no tuning or storage administration and with special
hardware chips to accelerate the performance of advanced analytics.

Want to learn more?

More details on the topics can
be found at the ASC Website under
past events.

[1]The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012,
Forrester Research, Inc., February 2, 2012. The Forrester Wave is copyrighted
by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave are trademarks of
Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Wave is a graphical representation of
Forrester's call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with
exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any
vendor, product, or service depicted in the Forrester Wave. Information is
based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and
are subject to change.